e-space Collection:http://hdl.handle.net/2173/31866
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 22:36:02 GMT2015-03-03T22:36:02ZDoes gender affect business ‘performance’? A study of microbusinesses in business services in the UKhttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/335785
Title: Does gender affect business ‘performance’? A study of microbusinesses in business services in the UK
Authors: Elizabeth, chell; Baines, Susan
Abstract: There is a dearth of studies that have examined the issue of the impact of gender on business performance. Three problems are evident in this earlier work:(1) the need to expose theoretical assumptions; (2) the adequacy of methodologies adopted; and (3) apparent equivocal results. A theme running through much of this work is whether the concept of ‘performance’ is itself gendered. This paper confines itself to addressing three research questions in respect of the impact of gender of business owner on business performance. The field data comprise a sample of 104 microbusinesses in business services in two locations-Newcastle upon Tyne and Milton Keynes, in the UK. The results show (1) no significant difference between the performance of the businesses of sole male and sole female owners, (2) clear evidence of the underperformance of spouse-owned businesses, (3) no support for the hypothesis that women have an ‘integrated approach’ to their business and personal lives (in contrast to men), and (4) evidence that cultural presuppositions about gender roles were most clearly demonstrated in the spouse-owned businesses.
Description: Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, published by and copyright Routledge.Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/3357852014-11-18T00:00:00ZWorking for each other: gender, the household and micro-business survival and growthhttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/335759
Title: Working for each other: gender, the household and micro-business survival and growth
Authors: Baines, S.; Wheelock, Jane
Abstract: Jane Wheelock is Reader in Social Policy and Susan Baines is an ESRC Management Research Fellow, both at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to better understanding of the concerns, needs and achievements of the 'business family', which may include a very wide variety of formal and informal relationships between family and business. Some of the results of a study of 200 micro-businesses, defined as businesses with up to nine employees, in the business services in the north-east and the south-east of England are reported here. Although the northern and southern location had very different socio-economic characteristics, patterns of family support for businesses were extremely similar. In both locations, there was extensive family involvement, in particular the involvement of spouses. Family labour could be a vital resource without which a struggling business would fail to survive but the extent of self-exploitation and the sacrifices made by some individuals should not be glossed over. Employment growth was a goal for only one in four of the businesses interviewed. Case study material confirmed survey findings that growth seeking business owners were the most likely to seek out partnerships with non-family members and to participate actively in non-family networks.
Description: Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in International Small Business Journal, published by and copyright Sage Publications Ltd.Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/3357592014-11-18T00:00:00ZReinventing traditional solutions: job creation, gender and the micro-business householdhttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/335784
Title: Reinventing traditional solutions: job creation, gender and the micro-business household
Authors: Baines, S.; Wheelock, J.
Abstract: There has been overwhelming interest in the numbers of jobs attributable to the formation and growth of new small firms but comparative silence about their working practices. We offer two novel, inter-linked approaches to thinking about work and employment in small firms. Firstly, we use a methodological approach which takes a household level analysis as a starting point, making gender a foundation stone. Secondly, we use an institutional perspective which focuses on power and power relations. From quantitative and qualitative empirical work with micro-businesses in business services we show that family work can be a vital resource. Yet there can also be severe costs, particularly for the many women who participate in business alongside their husbands as co-owners, employees and unpaid helpers. Gender divisions of labour are, typically, reproduced in traditional fashion. Even when business owners bring in employees from outside the family, relations within the micro-business are not fully market relations. Conflicts arise as business/owners and their employees struggle to manage these partially decommodified relations. The micro-business service sector actually represents a return to traditional ways of organising business by integrating business and household so that the traditional embedding of business and family of in-between pre-modern institutions is reinvented.
Description: Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Work, Employment & Society, published by and copyright Sage Publications Ltd.Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/3357842014-11-18T00:00:00ZWork and employment in small businesses: perpetuating and challenging gender traditionshttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/335783
Title: Work and employment in small businesses: perpetuating and challenging gender traditions
Authors: Baines, Susan; Wheelock, Jane
Abstract: More and more women and men are becoming dependent on some form of small business activity for all or part of their livelihoods but there is little research offering insight into gender and working practices in small businesses. In this article we assess some theoretical approaches and discuss these against an empirical investigation of micro-firms run by women, men and mixed sex partnerships. In the ‘entrepreneurship’ literature, with its emphasis on the individual business owner, we find little guidance. We argue that in the ‘modern’ micro-business, family and work are brought into proximity as in the ‘in between’ organizational form described by Weber. The celebrated ‘flexibility’ of small firms often involves the reproduction within modernity of seemingly pre-modern practices in household organization and gender divisions of labour. This is true in the Britain of the 1990s in a growing business sector normally associated neither with tradition nor with the family. Tradition, however, is never automatic or uncontested in a ‘post-traditional society’. A minority of women and men in micro-enterprises actively resist traditional solutions and even traditional imagery of male and female behaviour. For this small group alone new economic conditions seem to bring new freedom.
Description: Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Gender, Work and Organization, published by and copyright Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2173/3357832014-11-18T00:00:00Z